A descriptive comparative study of the strategies applied for the translation of the vernacular dialect of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men as a sociolect into Farsi

This study aims to identify and compare the strategies applied by native Farsi Translators, Parviz Dariyush (1975) and Soroush Habibi (2009), in rendering the vernacular dialect (Chicano English) of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1965) as a sociolect into Farsi. One hundred samples which contained seven unique characteristics of vernacular dialect limited to the two main characters of the novel, George and Lennie, were extracted from the novel with their Farsi equivalents. Sienkiewicz (1984, as cited in Berezowski 1997: 35) proposed strategies for the translation of dialects are taken as the model for this study to investigate the way dialectal features are dealt with in the selected parts and to check whether the procedure proposed by Sienkiewicz is sufficient and adequate for their translation. Analysing these samples, the results showed that one-to-one transference of dialectal elements is not practically possible into Farsi. However, both translators used phonological, syntactical, and morphological irregularities of Colloquial Farsi to show that the language of the novel is not standard language. Approximate Variety Substitution is the most frequent strategy used by Habibi and Dariyush. The aim of this strategy is to select a colloquial variety that has some dialectal features such as lexical, phonological, and morphological specifics and at the same time does not present an obvious recognizable TL dialect.

Perceptions of Standard and Nonstandard Language Varieties: The Influence of Ethnicity and Heritage Language Experience

The present study examines perceptions of standard and nonstandard varieties of English and the roles of perceived speaker ethnicity and heritage language experience. In this study, 24 English monolinguals and 24 English-Spanish heritage language bilinguals were asked to evaluate three speech samples representing native Standard American English, Chicano English, and non-native Spanish-accented English, each paired with one of three photographs of an individual reflecting idealized “Hispanic” or “non-Hispanic” ethnic identities. Both the language variety heard and the ethnic identity visually associated with a given speaker were found to influence listeners’ perceptions of the individual. While this study supports previous findings that visual cues lead to discrimination in language perception, it also indicates that language experience may mitigate this effect.

Cross-generational change in /l/ in Chicano English

The acoustic study of consonants has lagged considerably behind that of vowels. While a robust literature exists about vowel shifting, vowel quality, and the sociolinguistic significance of vowels, comparable literature is lacking for the acoustic quality of liquids. This study seeks to supplement the acoustic studies of vowels by analyzing characteristics of the liquid /l/ in its word-initial context. Traditionally, phonologists have subdivided /l/ into two allophones: dark and light, although current analysis has characterized these distinctions as gradient, not discrete. Word-initial /l/ is thought to be the canonically lightest variant of the phoneme, but cross-dialectal research has shown great acoustic variance in its phonetic realization. This case study aims to trace the phoneme through three generations of Chicano English speakers from South Texas, and to draw conclusions about how its variation among speakers and generations can shed light on other sociolinguistic phenomena, such as the persistence of substrate features from Spanish (with its characteristically light /l/s) or assimilation into mainstream American English dialects (with their characteristically dark /l/s). The study shows that there is indeed significant shift in the lightness of /l/ — independent of phonetic context — across the generations of speakers under examination. This result supports other studies that show notable assimilation with Anglo English varieties in earlier generations, but robust use of ethnically-marked phonological features among recent generations.